How do I help someone who gets laid off or hates their line of work? I’m going to give you one example of a client who actually meets both of these criteria.
Meet Kim: She Was Laid Off
Kim came to me in her early 20s, she was in her first career for a profit organization. Her area of specialty was communications and marketing. She was pretty unhappy with her job and regretted getting her degree.
Kim and I worked together for about 6 months. She wanted fast results and needed to feel significant.
In fact, if you don’t know by now, most human beings have a psychological need for significance.
Recognize Your Need for Significance
Humans need to know they’re contributing to something meaningful, they don’t want to do work just for work sake. It’s not about the paycheque anymore. There is so much more to strive for beyond mere survival (for many of us, not all). Generally want to feel like we’re contributing to something, we want to feel significant, and we want to feel important.
Learn To Love Where You Are
Now because of the stage that Kim was at in her career, and because she recently had a degree, it didn’t make sense for Kim to leave her position just yet. Through coaching she learned that she could make this job work for a few more years, so we taught her how to fall in love with her job all over again.
Just as we got there Kim was laid off, the market tanked and Kim was laid off. BOO! This is one of those frustrating things about life. Being laid off! LAID OFF! She had literally just learned to like her job.
Her company gave her a small severance and a few more weeks to work, just to give her some time to prepare. This was difficult for Kim because she’s highly introverted, and lacks self-confidence in her skill and ability to get employed again.
By the way, if you are laid off, try mapping out your network in 5 easy steps.
3 Gentle Crazy Things
Not that her skills aren’t there, just that she didn’t see how amazing she was yet because she didn’t have the experience to do so. So, we did some crazy but gentle things. These things challenged Kim but made her stand out above other job searchers and networkers.
- As best I could I opened doors for Kim, and connected her with people in my network to help her learn from them, and expand her practice of networking. Doing this also helped her to learn about her industry, and to learn a little more about her industry. I can’t open doors for all of my clients but where it’s appropriate, and where I have connections I try to do so. If you aren’t working with me, tap into your networks.
- We used scripts and questionnaires to help her propel in this area she was extremely uncomfortable with.
- We seat a networking challenge for her to contact a number of people in a short period of time.
Using the skills that Kim and I talked about for networking, like doing these crazy challenging but gentle things, Kim actually had 3 interviews lined up within a 2-week period. Then she was able to get herself into a position that she enjoyed just as much!
